Talk:Democratic Republic of Neualtenburg
Merger Suggestion This and the stuff in Anzere need merging now that N'berg has left Anzere. Anzere will presumably be put up for auction. Roberta Dalek 15:59, 3 May 2005 (EDT) Praise This is a really good article, certainly one of our best. Has it ever been featured on the home page? It definitely deserves to be. I wonder if Eugene would be interested in applying for the standard L$1000 reward? Eggy 16:24, 10 Nov 2005 (EST) I concur, one of the better articles, very well done Eugene! I'll put it up on the front on the next rotation. Oz Spade 14:34, 13 Nov 2005 (EST) Content Dispute May I point out to the moderators of this wiki (*waves* at Eggy) that the first paragraph of this text is under dispute? There is no "coup" (just a couple of persons leaving the group), no "forking of a project" (whatever that means), and the claim of "Neualtenburg and the Neualtenburg Projekt" being the copyright of a single individual is not yet proven in court. Can we just stick to the facts here? Thanks :) Gwyneth Llewelyn 22:20, 2 Jun 2006 (EDT) There are no moderators on this wiki. It's a democracy. If you dispute something on this article please document your version of things. We want to hear both sides of a controversy, and unless you two get into an edit war, we won't protect the page :) Eggy 08:34, 3 Jun 2006 (EDT) Ok, I'll play by the rules. As a justification for the warning: As can be seen on the text on the 2nd paragraph of the History chapter, there is no "group dedicated to virtual-world political experimentation, whose first project was Neualtenburg", but a "group proposing to Linden Lab the creation of a self-governed community in Second Life". There has been no "coup", just a former member of the original project returning to SL after 5 months after abandoning the community of Neualtenburg and any claims on intellectual property there, but reverting her decision afterwards, and subsequently claiming the existence of several projects, past and future, using the name "Neualtenburg". Since October 2004, Neualtenburg has been the name of the community living first in Anzere and later in the sim of the same name. Parts of the intellectual property of the Neualtenburg community are currently under legal dispute. In any case, read this forum thread for a contrary "opinion". Gwyneth Llewelyn 15:02, 3 Jun 2006 (EDT) Ulrika Zugzwang was in negotiations with the above group for the purchase of her intellectual property in the sim. The group broke off negotiations and, operating above their own law without the knowledge of several elected officials (a coup), locked the Neualtenburg forum and deleted all new protesting posts. Because negotiations were terminated, Ulrika Zugzwang has revoked their right to use her copyrighted material and trademark. The forum was later returned to the control of Ulrika Zugzwang and Kendra Bancroft. A DMCA notification was issued to LL concerning the copyright infringement. Additionally, material on this page has been directly taken from my website which is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 (by-nc-nd) license, meaning I can revoke permission for its use at any time. I suggest keeping this entry locked to give the aforementioned group a chance to change its name and create a new wiki entry now that the project has forked. Ulrika Zugzwang 19:49, 3 Jun 2006 (EDT) Ulrika Zugzwang was indeed in negotiations to settle once and for all her claim of having her intellectual property rights wronged by the City (see the steps in this negotiation process here). It's impossible to describe the complexity of this process in a single line, but let it remain, for the record, that in January 2006 Ulrika Zugzwang abandoned "once and for all" Neualtenburg and Second Life, accepted payment from the City for her past work and declared to "leave all her content there": "I am accepting the balance of the city treasury L$19k as payment for the bond money still owed to me by the city (US$146). I will leave all virtual-world objects in place as they are." (reference here). Negotiations terminated after a third round, when surprisingly almost all of the initial terms during the first round were accepted, but, as time went on, Ulrika's decision was reverted on each and every one of the terms, until there was no single term left for discussion — when it was clearly pointless to continue. In the cited paragraph on the page under discussion, there is some misappropriation of the word "coup", which just means "the sudden overthrow of a government through unconstitutional means by a part of the state establishment that mostly replaces just the top power figures." If it's the Government officials, applying policy inside their constitutional mandate, it's no "coup" — just the Government regularly working (eg. George Bush establishing a tax raise is not a "coup", no matter how impopular that measure is). Actions to moderate the forums are the sole responsability of a Government branch called the Scientific Council, who, under the terms of the Neualtenburg Constitution (Art. III, Sec. 1) have a mandate of "Its service roll is to ... moderate user forums and events". This very same Council tried to moderate two different forums related to Neualtenburg — one set up by Aliasi Stonebender, one set up by Ulrika under the Linden forums, and failed in its role of moderation, since there was no way to enforce that moderation — those two forums thus have left the status of "official" forums (in the same sense that the Linden forums under http://forums.secondlife.com are the official forums for Linden Lab where a Linden ToS is binding, although there exist several other resident-run forums under no such compulsion). The authority of defining what is "official" and what is not official is in the hands of the community of Neualtenburg and its elected Government, not a single individual who is not part of the city by her own formal admission. The DMCA notification to LL was not received at the time of writing, but apparently refers to the use of the community's name "Neualtenburg". Names of communities cannot be "copyrighted" or even "trademarked"; no single individual can claim the right to a community's name (for instance, the heirs of Stalin have no claim on the name "Stalingrad", even if it's quite clearly documented that Joseph Stalin created that name), especially not one that has left the community by her own will several months ago (see Wikipedia for more information on what can and cannot be trademarked or copyrighted; in effect, as long as there is a community using the name Neualtenburg to describe themselves, the name itself belongs to the community). The text on this page might indeed contain material violating third parties' copyrights (example: the map is clearly Ulrika Zugzwang's, and it was uploaded with a permission which allegedly has now been revoked) and should clearly be labeled so, and the authors notified to rewrite the offending material and replace images that are in violation of anybody's copyrights. A wiki discussion page is a poor place to carry on an ideological battle. Why don't we give these poor fellows a break, eh? Ulrika Zugzwang 19:49, 3 Jun 2006 (EDT) The new text is rather better, but I've still added a few changes to reflect what happened. In particular, referring to a group of 30+ residents as "refugees" (to justify the 2 that went away) seems rather abusive. As a matter of fact, calling those two "exilees", since they started a new project under a new model (see Port Neualtenburg for a reference) would also be abusive. Added the word "alleged" to copyright violations; at the time of writing this, the DMCA notification was still not received, but in the mean time, the whole community felt it was better to simply change the name to Neufreistadt and move forwards, letting the past be the past. Gwyneth Llewelyn 17:32, 22 Jun 2006 (EDT) Formal Warning The administration would like to remind Ulrika Zugzwang that her status as a close personal friend to one of the founders does not earn her any tolerance with regards to blatant acts of vandalism. At the History Wiki, we aim to follow the standard wiki philosophy that articles should generally evolve towards a greater amount of content, as determined by a democratic community decision process, embodied by talk pages. As such, wholesale deletion of article content will generally not be considered acceptable behavior, and the random modification of other people's comments on talk pages is strictly forbidden, as it corrupts the democratic process that allows truth to emerge from the collective wisdom of the crowd. There will be no further warnings. Repeated acts of vandalism will result in a temporary ban from the wiki. Take-Down Request The content on this page is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 (by-nc-nd), as it was copied from my website. As the license states, I can revoke permission for its use at any time. I revoke this site's permission to post my copyrighted work. Do I have the right to remove this given its copyright without administrative retribution or should I submit a DMCA notice to the administrators? ~Ulrika~ Ongoing Investigation The History Wiki does not allow uploading of copyrighted material. As such, this page is being deleted and protected pending further investigation. My thoughts I'm not particularly interested in the underlying situation in and of itself (it seems rather immature and petty to me), and I'm hardly a lawyer, but I will note (for the sake of sanity, of not setting bad precedent, and of moving this conflict off the wiki) that historical data and mere references to something by its accepted name are not prohibited under either copyright or trademark. Copyright certainly applies to the text of an article that came from Ulrika's website. The main question, then, is who copied it here. (I don't know and don't care enough to look into it.) If it was someone else, then removing the article is appropriate. But if it was Ulrika herself, then she was effectively re-licensing that text under this wiki's GNU FDL. In either case, someone writing a new article would eliminate the copyright issue. As for trademarks (which weren't mentioned in Ulrika's request, but I've seen the idea come up on the forums, and I'd prefer to avoid having to come back later to comment on it), there are provisions in the Lanham Act protecting nominative and descriptive uses of a trademark, assuming one were even granted**, so even if it became Neualtenburg ™, there's nothing wrong with mentioning it here. Trademark is intended to protect against improper competitive/confusing use of a mark, not to allow total control of references. ** On a federal level and in many states, they have to be registered and granted, they can be contested, and from what I've seen, I rather suspect the sim government has the stronger claim due to tacit approval, consistent usage, and non-abandonment. -- Dyne 15:39, 5 Jun 2006 (EDT) Content Removed After discussions with the wiki liaison they've agreed to take down the content, which was a verbatim copy of the material on my web page, placed there by a third party. This situation is similar to how Gwyneth Llewelyn had an exact duplicate of my website (neualtenburg.org) installed under her domain (neualtenburg.info) without permission, where the copyrighted information was removed on request with the group later reverse engineering (in lower quality) the entire site. I understand that this entry will be reentered in a similar fashion and that is acceptable. I feel a history wiki should have this information and beyond the addition of copyrighted text there's little that shouldn't be present on this site, including trademarks. I understand that the removal degrades the historical quality of the wiki (it was a great entry), however, when weighed against my psychological need to exercise control over something in a situation where I'm defending myself against piracy and general bullying from a larger group, I think it's the right choice for me right now. I've already promised that I'll make some absolutely fantastic pages to compensate for the loss of this one. I'll start tonight. Apologies and thank you for letting me be selfishly human. ~Ulrika~